The Major's Daughter (8 page)

“Do you like him? His name is Bruno.”

“I like him very much,” she answered in German. “I'm sorry he's an orphan.”

“We'll take good care of him,” the man said. “He can be our mascot.”

“He'll get big rather quickly,” said someone from the group of men.

“In Germany he would be used for the circus,” said the man on his knees.

“Maybe you can teach him to ride a bicycle.”

She did not intend it to be particularly funny, but the men gave a good, hearty laugh at the joke. She felt the laughter must stem from the idea of interacting with the commandant's daughter. At the same time it felt good to laugh with the men. She wondered what the editorial writers would say if they could see that Germans and Americans had so much in common after all. She passed little Bruno to Lieutenant Peters, though the bear struggled to stay with her.

“Were you able to translate the poem I gave you?” August asked in German.

He had crossed the circle and suddenly stood beside her. He smelled of pine and the heat of the day. She quickly drew the letter from her waistband and passed it to him.

“A few of the lines gave me difficulty,” she said, “and I had difficulty with the meter. But I think I've managed.”

“Thank you,” he said.

“It was my pleasure. It's a lovely poem. I'd never heard of the poet before.”

How strange and powerful it felt to be near him! She worried he would snap open the letter and read it in front of her. But fortunately the bear managed to struggle free from Lieutenant Peters at that moment and Lieutenant Peters hurriedly released him on the ground. The little bear ran to the man at the center of the ring for security, and the men laughed at seeing such a human behavior.

Gradually the men, tired and dirty from work, began to disband. The man in the center picked up the bear and carried it like a baby toward the barracks. He made Bruno wave good-bye with his tiny paw. Collie waved back, then looked up once more at August. He smiled, and their eyes could not let go.

“Do you write your own poetry?” Collie asked, more for conversation than for anything else.

“Yes, a little.”

“I look forward to reading your work someday.”

“It's nothing important, honestly.”

“I'm sure you underestimate yourself,” Collie said.

“I am better at music. I have a few years of classical training.”

“How wonderful. On the piano?”

“Yes. I am not so good, but I can manage. Do you play?”

“Only in the most rudimentary fashion. I've requisitioned a piano, because I thought it would be good for camp morale. But as for me, ‘Chopsticks,'” she said the last word in English, because she had no idea what the word in German might be.

He made a puzzled face. She pantomimed two hands playing “Chopsticks” and he nodded immediately.

“Yes, of course. ‘Chopsticks.'”

His mispronunciation of
chopsticks
endeared him to her. At the same moment, she realized the other men had disappeared, even Lieutenant Peters. Part of her wanted to say that speaking to a young man was perfectly respectable, but another part of her understood how obvious their attraction must appear. She felt nervous at the thought of it.

“A nice bear,” he said, apparently finding it as difficult as she did to break away.

“Yes, a lovely little thing.”

“Can you tell me,” he asked, his face suddenly serious, “if the rumors are true that we will be sent to England after this? Still as prisoners?”

“I haven't heard such a thing.”

“It's talked about in the barracks. We will work to make reparations to England for our bombing of London.”

“I think it's too early to know what may happen.”

“That would be very hard,” he said, pushing his chin toward the barracks. “Hard on these men.”

“Yes, I could imagine.”

“Rumors are like mice. They live in the corners and feed on crumbs.”

He smiled. It was a charming smile. For a moment she could do nothing but stay in his eyes. Finally she managed to excuse herself without panic. He thanked her again for the poem and promised to read it that night. She backed away and said good-bye. She wondered, as she climbed the steps to the administration building, if he felt even the smallest part of what she could not help but feel.

 • • • 

“If you ask me, the Germans should pay heavily, heavily indeed for their aggression,” Sherman Heights said, his hand pushing away a large cigar from his mouth. “We can't let them up again. We should put our heel on their throats and not give them a breath. We went too easy on them after the First War.”

“They think they have the right . . . ,” another man began, but Major Brennan watched him get cut off by a reporter, a thin, serpentine man who wrote for one of the Boston papers.

“You said yourself, Major, that there has already been an escape. It's a bad precedent to have German prisoners on our soil. This war should be fought on European soil, not here,” the reporter, a man named Whipple, or Whittle, Major Brennan couldn't remember, said from his position near the fireplace of the Heights' magnificent home. The reporter held a drink in his hand that threatened to slosh over the rim.

“We didn't have a choice in it,” said Elman Thorne, one of the town fathers from Stark. He was a large, stolid man, with a farmer's neck and heavy shoulders. “Washington gave the orders and we followed. They play the music and we dance. . . .”

“Did the escaped German . . . did he make it very far? Are the reports accurate that he got stopped on his way to Boston?” the reporter asked.

Major Brennan could not accommodate them all. Everywhere he went these questions bombarded him, and he knew without doubt that no answer he gave would satisfy them. They spoke to hear their own thoughts; they spoke to top one another, to prove their insight into the war was greater than the next man's. It fatigued him. He had known as soon as Sherman Heights had invited him into his study, abandoning his daughter to the care of Heights's wife, Eleanor, that he had stepped into the lion's den. The men, huddling to smoke and drink in Sherman Heights's luxurious study, had fallen on him as soon as he had stepped through the door. Major Brennan understood he represented the faceless authorities, the government, the military, for men who felt removed from the war. Their questions betrayed a hunger for involvement, for understanding, that he was powerless to provide.

“The escaped German did not get far,” Major Brennan said wearily. “Whatever you've heard to the contrary is mere rumor. He was not a—”

“The fact that he got out at all,” Thorne, the town father, interrupted, “is a travesty. I'm all for a humane treatment of prisoners, I am, but in this case . . .”

“What I was going to say is that the prisoner was not what you would call an aggressive sort. He was a pretty timid boy, by all accounts. I think he was less on the warpath and more a simple case of homesickness.”

“That may be,” Whipple, or Whittle said, his drink going down too fast, Major Brennan saw, “but what about that next lad? Or the one after that? They're threats to the community and to the country at large.”

Happily Eleanor Heights tapped on the door, then breezed in to tell her husband that he had run off with half of the party. She was a tall, handsome woman with a nose too large for her face. Yet the nose worked; it gave her a Roman dignity, a face not typical in Maine. Major Brennan watched Sherman Heights push out of his wingback chair, his cigar emitting a cloud above his head. He laughed and shrugged, giving in to his wife immediately.

“Cake is being served,” Eleanor Heights announced. “You'll miss out if you don't come directly. And as it's a cake for me, I'm going to insist you men break this up immediately and come along.”

Major Brennan followed his hosts out to the party proper. The last daylight washed the large living room in quiet grays. A maid had apparently delivered a three-tiered cake to the large dining room table, and she now busily lighted the candles that bristled from the top. The room lights had been lowered to add to the atmosphere.

“I'm fifty years old today,” Eleanor Heights announced to the group around the table. “I know a woman is supposed to hide her age, but what's the use? I'm proud to be fifty. I have much to be grateful for, and I'm well aware of it. With luck, I may have another twenty years, perhaps even longer. . . .”

“Much longer,” her husband said.

“Well, if you can stand it, I can stand it,” Eleanor rejoined to her husband, and that brought a laugh. “Now once Mary here has finished with the candles, you all must sing to me and then I'll be done with my birthday. A half a century! That's a remarkable thing, and at the same time it's nothing at all.”

Major Brennan liked Eleanor Heights's directness. He watched the cake lighting with genuine pleasure. Eleanor pantomimed turning away, then turning back and feigning surprise. Everyone laughed and then broke into a fractured version of “Happy Birthday.” Major Brennan suspected Eleanor had a theater background lurking somewhere in her past. He was going to say as much to his daughter—who stood almost directly across the table, her loveliness in the room a match for the candles—when a woman's voice spoke close to his ear.

“You must be the Major Brennan that everyone talks so much about,” she said in a rich, husky voice. “I'm glad finally to see you with my own eyes. You're not such a horrible creature after all.”

He made a quarter turn, as people do when they are supposed to be observing a ceremony yet want to talk unobtrusively, and saw a woman of about his age standing at his elbow. She had sharp gray eyes, a rather narrow nose, and hair the color of a corn broom that was held in place, at the back, by a large silver clip. She wore a simple lavender dress, slightly prim, beneath a boiled-wool vest.

“I'm glad to hear that,” he said softly, his eyes meeting hers. “But I've already eaten three children today.”

“Were they delicious?”

“Yes, as a matter of fact. Now, you have the advantage of me. Who are you?”

“I'm the town librarian and also the town widow. I'm the woman invited to round things out or to pull an oar on a social occasion. Lucinda Seaver. My husband was a lumberman about these parts.”

Major Brennan nodded and said nothing while Eleanor Heights blew out the forest of candles. Everyone clapped.

“Please come to see me next time you're in Berlin,” Lucinda said. “You're probably in need of a home-cooked meal. We could stand on ceremony and take three or four meetings before I extended the invitation, but I don't believe in that sort of thing. Besides, I want to come see Camp Stark and I hoped you would show me around. Your daughter has already volunteered you.”

Major Brennan glanced quickly at his daughter, but she had her hand out to receive a piece of cake and he was reasonably certain she deliberately avoided his eye. He felt confused and flushed. It was one thing to answer questions from eager, ill-informed men about the camp, but it was another to contemplate sailing out on the vast sea that must be crossed between a man and a woman.

“I'd be a fool to decline,” he said. “Thank you for the invitation.”

“And bring your daughter, of course. She tells me she will have a friend visiting? From Ohio?”

“Yes, any day now.”

“Well, you see? I will make a useful destination. Come to see me, don't forget.”

She left to help with the ice cream afterward. Major Brennan stood in a slight daze, wondering what had just occurred. Before he could sort things out, one of the Heights' servants came to him and said he was wanted on the phone. Major Brennan followed the man into the kitchen and picked the phone off the wall. It was Lieutenant Peters.

“Something strange has occurred, I'm afraid,” Lieutenant Peters said. “You probably should get back here.”

“What is it?”

“Someone, or some group, has arranged the rocks up at the Devil's Slide into a swastika.”

“The rock formation?” Major Brennan asked, to clarify. “The one above the village?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How large?”

“Large, sir. It's quite visible.”

“When did this happen?”

“It's hard to say. It was just a matter of when people began noticing it.”

“All right. I'll be back directly. At first light, send a crew up to disperse the rocks. Downplay the whole incident as much as possible. It does no good to make a fuss over it.”

“No, sir, I understand.”

“Someone's sending a message of support, I suppose.”

“That's how I read it, sir.”

“There are plenty of Nazis in America.”

“Yes, sir.”

“We're just finishing up here. We'll be along.”

“Sorry to interrupt, sir, but I figured you would want to know.”

“Yes, of course.”

Major Brennan hung the handset back on the wall. In the dining room, people clapped at something that had been said or done. Major Brennan brought his white handkerchief to his lips. If only he could draw a full breath, he thought. Things would be much easier if he could simply do that.

 • • • 

Henry Heights watched Collie Brennan slip into her jacket and thought that she would make a perfect wife for him. She was beautiful; that was beyond discussion. But she also possessed self-assurance, and a social ease, that was extremely attractive. She was smart and well informed, better informed, in fact, than many of the men who tried to show off with their knowledge of current events. Yes, he could marry her, he thought. She was exactly the kind of woman for him.

Nevertheless, he felt shy and awkward around her. He had taken a few jolts of whiskey from his brother's flask, but even that lubrication did not make it easy to approach her. Now, to his dismay, she was readying to depart. People surrounded her.